Lanier took music into poetry in his "Science of
English Verse." Wagner also thought that because of the exactness of
musical science, a composer became practically the actor of each of
his parts, while the dramatic author could never be sure what meaning
would be read into his lines.

The native poetic temperament of MacDowell and his almost invariable
use of lines, figures or stanzas of poetry as inspiration in
composition leads one to believe that he would have attempted opera
when he had grown to it. This was one of the few musical forms that he
did not essay. Perhaps he was of the opinion of Beethoven, as Wagner
conceived him, who said when speaking of opera: "The man who created a
_true_ musical drama would be looked upon as a fool--and would _be_
one in very truth if he did not keep such a thing to himself, but
wanted to bring it before the public."

MacDowell is frequently called a mystic, and most of his efforts
breathe the Celtic spirit, which is full of melancholy, romance and
tenderness. Ghosts creep through their pages and wandering, restless
spirits call from his most characteristic harmonies. Wagner was a
mystic at sixteen, dwelling largely in the abstract, but grew out of
this, through varied experience, into an active philosopher, with
every objective faculty on the alert, and thus escaped, perhaps, the
fate of MacDowell.

The literary loves of MacDowell, who supplied him with such a wealth
of inspiration, were Goethe, Heine, Shakespeare, Tennyson and Keats,
and he was himself a poet of no mean ability. Lawrence Gilman says, in
his thorough analysis of his work, that, writing as he usually does
from some poetic theme, the effect is lost if the hearer does not know
the idea around which the composition is woven. For instance, one is
apt to take "A.D. 1620" for a funeral dirge, just to hear it without
knowledge of the subject, as it somewhat resembles the Chopin Funeral
March; but the title suggests something historic, and knowing the
lines that inspired it, one can easily distinguish the waves and the
majestic movement of a great ship putting out to sea.

Naturally, MacDowell drew heavily upon the German poets, Goethe and
Heine, in his earlier works, as he began his serious study of
composition in Germany. Equally naturally did he turn to Tennyson, as
they are alike in psychic development and in their powers of
interpretation of nature. Recently, in Lincoln, England, a new statue
of Tennyson was unv